The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  Harry is sick and drinks to revive his spirits. He has influenza and it is manifesting itself through his bowels. He shits constantly and takes on salt and sugar and water. He is barely putting up with me as I recount Ernie’s story from earlier in the day and we watch hurting men dance with young ladies. Out on the pavement a scuffle is ranging up. Two riders.

  ‘You know them?’ Harry asks.

  I shake my head. ‘Belgians? I think. Walloon boys. Maybe.’

  ‘You want to –’ and soon we are both standing and we arch our necks to look. Opperman and Percy join us and we walk outside together to watch as bad punches are thrown. The two of them are barely connecting, but there’s blood on their faces. A torn lip and the red has transferred to the other. We watch them prowl on the cobblestones. Arms out ready to grapple, I see one has a nail busted and that hand is dripping on the ground and he steps around his own puddle. They snarl, though it could be speech. One lunges and the other dodges, slipping. An ankle goes over and a grunt ricochets off the wall.

  Harry drinks the brandy and winces. He wipes at his mouth. ‘You know, if we were Greeks and we were back in the age.’

  ‘They’d be starkers.’

  ‘And we’d be doing this race starkers,’ he says.

  ‘Lord,’ Percy says. ‘The Lord’s mercy.’

  ‘Our bits waggling about.’

  ‘And they’d kill us afterwards,’ I say. ‘Lions they haven’t fed for two months.’

  ‘That was the Romans.’

  ‘Romans, lions. Who cares? The point is we’d be starkers.’

  ‘And then, they’d put us in a corner and stone us,’ Harry says. ‘They’d stand around throwing rocks.’

  I lean on Harry’s shoulder. Grunts, the swipe and slap of amateur hands.

  ‘Not much cop, huh,’ says Percy, nodding at the fighters.

  ‘Think they’ll ever make contact?’ I ask him.

  ‘That’s a lot of flailing you’re seeing there, arms and hair,’ Percy says. He’s shaking his head, vaguely appalled. I put my hand on his shoulder. He looks at me and smiles, then grimaces as one fighter leaves the ground trying to land a punch, the sound of knees on cobblestones. ‘Hopeless,’ Percy says and looks at Opperman. ‘I’m leaving. Homer?’ We look at Opperman, but he stays standing beside the sweating onlookers. Yesterday Echo de Sport described his efforts as Homeric; Homer he has become. His eyes squint, he’s quietly mesmerised. The reddened hands of the Belgians swaying in front of us as they look for an opening. Earlier in the day he’d come in with the front 25 and something had them conspiring to spread out and dawdle across the line, their front wheels together. Desgrange was furious, a steaming face of moustache and gutter words. He made them sprint a lap of the velodrome so to make proper winners of the leg. He threatened the last placegetter with expulsion from the race if he did not try. So they went once around the track, like scolded children. None of them recall who placed where (except Leducq, who merrily claimed victory). Instead, those first 25 bonded in amusement for their antics. Percy turns out of the crowd and quickly vanishes.

  A punch is lunged and blood comes from the fist and slaps an Italian on the cheek and there’s a moment where laughter brightens the din.

  ‘Replacements,’ Opperman says. ‘I think they’re replacements.’

  ‘Oh, fucking replacements,’ Harry says and steps back and I find myself doing the same thing.

  ‘Whose replacements?’ I ask.

  ‘Discuter, I think,’ Oppy says.

  ‘Discuter. What do you think, Harry?’

  ‘Seen better on a footy field.’

  ‘Everything’s better on a footy field,’ I say. I look at Harry and realise there is no hint of violence about the man, no snarl or flame in his features. I’d called him the Priest a few years back, and now the French were doing the same in the papers. René de Latour started it, saying he looked more like a priest than a cyclist and it spread. My secret name hasn’t taken hold. I say ‘Prince’ to people, and they look back glumly.

  ‘One time,’ I say, ‘we were out walking on the farm, me and my brother. We went down into a culvert between two paddocks and he suddenly kicks my legs out from under me. Wham. I’m on my back in silage. You know the stink. And then he puts himself down on top of me, jabbing at my ribs and kidneys. My ears were filled up with mud and I couldn’t hear if he was saying anything. Just wham, wham. Jesus, you wouldn’t believe the capacity of some people for mindless rage. He sat there in the mud later crying. Not out of sadness, or regret. Just out of confusion. Damned confusion. I pulled him up and guided him home. That walk of his.’

  ‘Your brother. I always thought there was something dangerous in his movements,’ Harry says, and turns back to the fight. I forgot that he’d met him, spoken with him. So much of our lives is forgotten, left to drift in the sea of displaced memory. A knuckle catches one of the Walloon boys and the crowd seems to go silent for a moment as if something real had finally caught a hold of them, stunning their yelps and calls.

  We find ourselves moving around the harbour. All the old stone. The Mediterranean lapping at the sea wall and the boats tied to posts older than New Zealand and older than her mountains’ multiple names. The smell of the salt water and the way it overcomes things. Something so near about the smell, as if it were designed specifically to make us feel whole, that no matter where we were in the world we could be rectified by the smell of brine. I say this to Harry. He agrees, for once.

  The sense of fist and faces. Faces twisting with the hit and skin torn on the knuckle. The compulsion to watch sits uncomfortably with the aftermath of revulsion. A sense that we are burrowing in another’s pain. I walk with this, I walk with the burning drive of the ephedrine, I walk with the alcohol in my legs. We walk in the yellow haze of the old stone that lines the harbour and the buildings that fortified her in the days when battles were still fought on the sea and in harbours and in fields cleared of cattle and not the things my brother crawled through back then, the wire and the wet sand and the trenches of dead Germans and their rot. Christ, it’s a fine life this Tour and the rest.

  Harry and I find the Spanish boy sitting alone in a café. I’m surprised to see him still with us. He hails me with a version of my name I don’t recognise but accept. We sit with him to talk, to listen to the lad jabber in his particular English. All about us are tables and glasses of wine and their owners’ arguments. I’m relieved to see him, relieved to see that he has made it through. I can’t bear the idea of him not finishing when his end is so near.

  ‘I haven’t seen you on the road,’ I say. ‘I’ve missed you on the road.’ I’m not sure what I mean by that quite and Harry looks at me side on.

  ‘I have missed you,’ he says. He drinks from his glass which I realise is water. I laugh and he joins me for a moment.

  ‘But you are still riding?’ I say.

  ‘Yes. I am going to be replaced in Nice.’

  ‘One more day.’

  ‘Mmm. Yes,’ he says. He sounds warm and full of hope. ‘Fresh riders.’

  ‘Fresh riders?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Well,’ I say.

  ‘I have banged –’ he pauses and furrows his brow. I notice he is touching his elbow. It is bulbous, swollen by its own juices from a cracked membrane.

  ‘Elbow?’ I suggest and he nods.

  ‘Yes. And I have difficult steering. So they replace me. Gracias.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘Indeed,’ says Harry.

  ‘We could do with some replacing,’ I say. I elbow Watson. ‘The lot of us, but especially this one.’

  ‘My cold,’ Harry says, ‘what I thought was a cold, is the flu. It’s uncontrollable.’

  ‘He’s miserable to be around,’ I say.

  ‘Cold?’ the lad says. ‘Brrrr?’ And he raises his eyebrows and wraps his arms around himself.

  ‘Um, no. Sick. I’m sick,’ Harry says.

  ‘Si, I know. I know.’
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br />   ‘Influenza,’ Harry says.

  ‘He throws up in the street,’ I say to the little Spaniard. ‘Vomits. Blurgh,’ I say and the lad coughs. He pulls up his shirt and then his undershirt to reveal a thick carpet of scab up his side. I nod. A group of men come into the courtyard and I wait a moment for them to pass, then I stand in the street to peel my trousers down and show the red bleed of my thigh, the result of my dual crashes two days ago in the mountains after I’d spoken to the old farmer of this and that. It’s long and feels like blunted sandpaper.

  ‘Mmm,’ the Spaniard says. ‘My toe. It is broken. They say it is broken.’

  ‘Percy,’ I say. ‘Our Percy, his ankle is sprained, but I suspect it’s broken. One of the little bones. He can ride still, but I think it is broken.’

  Harry nudges the boy and nods his head at me. ‘His father is a doctor.’ The boy nods slowly and flops his bottom lip out. ‘He can say anything,’ Harry continues, ‘and who are we to contradict him?’

  ‘Who are we to contradict?’ I say. I laugh, but it goes by unnoticed.

  ‘Señor Doctor,’ the boy says.

  ‘Señor Doctor,’ I say. I feel no need to tell him it is not I who is a doctor but my father. It’s a great deal more fun to be someone another has invented for you. I’ll act the pig farmer if I have found myself mixed in by an erring conversation. I’ll talk for hours about trotters and swine if words will have me. Once, for an audience of aunts unrelated to me but to a girl I believed I half loved, I was a pilot. A pilot of disaster. I crashed in a field in ’21, was my narration, and walked away with a bone piercing my chest, another turned inwards by the joystick and pushing on my right lung. ‘It is withered now,’ I told them. ‘If anyone asks, it is withered. I ride on one lung, the other like a dried leaf vibrating in my chest. Each breath like a song. Here, listen,’ I said and offered my chest for the aunt to lean on and hear. I am the great singing cyclist of the green Taranaki, I told her. She said she didn’t hear anything and I surmised that not hearing something doesn’t necessarily make it untrue, just makes it slightly more intriguing.

  The boy fishes about under his seat for his bag. He puts it on his lap and takes a few things out and places them on the table. He puts the bag back on the stones. He picks up the pack of cards and removes the ribbon which held them together in a set and I think we are due to receive a magic trick. I feel a nervous twitch. Perhaps it’s excitement, I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it runs its fingernail down my neck where all the hairs are made to rise. He carefully takes the cards and splits the deck and I watch his hands spread the cards out on the table amongst our glasses. Harry points to a card and says, ‘That one. I choose that one.’ But the lad ignores him and I realise he is looking for something. Finally he collects them all up, barring one, and puts the deck back beside the ribbon. ‘My,’ he says and turns over the card to reveal a picture of a young woman glued to its surface. ‘My girl,’ he says uncertainly.

  I stare at it and look at him and he gestures that it is okay that I pick it up. ‘She’s pretty,’ I say. ‘Harry, have a look. She’s so pretty.’

  ‘She’s your girl?’ Harry asks as he takes the photo from me.

  ‘I tell her I will be back, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘What do you mean you’re not sure?’ I say. ‘She’s something spectacular.’ And she is. Familiar and distant. The sit of her hair and the shape of her shoulders. I think of my brother’s wife. The thoughtful weight of her visage as she considers whether something pleases her or merely amuses. Katherine and all the things you mistake for love.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. His skin is smooth, soft and kindly pale.

  ‘How are you not sure?’ Harry asks, then hooks his thumb at me. ‘Ignore that one, he’s drunk or something.’

  ‘Show him your picture,’ I say to Harry. ‘The one of your wife.’

  ‘I have her waiting,’ the lad says.

  ‘That’s not very nice,’ I say.

  ‘She’s nice but I think maybe not. Maybe not my girl.’

  ‘That’s wrong,’ I say. ‘Write to her and say: “I love you. Keep your lips for me, your mouth and eyes, for me and no other.” I demand it. Harry?’

  Harry puts his hand to the top pocket of his shirt.

  I take the photo back up and look at the girl. She has a loneliness, a plaintive searching look as if asking for sympathy from some near creature. I nod and say, ‘She’s asking the photographer to stop staring at her.’

  The boy looks at me then at Harry, then back at me.

  ‘She’s saying, “Stop staring at me!”’

  ‘She’s asking?’ the boy says.

  ‘Who took the photo?’ I ask.

  ‘A man,’ he says. He looks uncomfortable and reaches for the picture, but I hold on to it for a while longer. I look again at her mouth, her lips, the way the shadow has formed on her features. She is looking downwards just a mite. She is asking something. I swear.

  ‘A very generous man?’ I ask.

  ‘Generous.’

  ‘He must be generous to grant a picture to your girl and let her give it to you.’ The Spaniard is a poor boy, a wretched family of a factory-working father and a crippled mother. I doubt he could have the hand of a girl who has so many pennies she might spend them on a photograph.

  ‘She didn’t give me the photo.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No she didn’t.’ I look at Harry who is sorting through the pictures he carries with him. ‘No,’ I say to him of his wife, of his child. ‘Put it away.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put it away,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t want to see your pictures.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Harry asks.

  ‘Put it away,’ I say.

  He shows it to the boy and tells him her name. They smile together, and when he tells him she’s pregnant the boy makes a hushed sound. The boy’s photo sits on the table and I can’t look at it. It’s the only thing on the table. The only thing I am aware of is the girl on the photo, the bright of the flash powder and the startled glint on her cheeks. I have to stand up to avoid looking at her. I feel her staring at me, the young woman. I want to ask her a question the little Spaniard can’t answer. I want to ask her why she is sitting in a studio having her photo taken, I want to ask her how it feels. I want to know how it feels to have this boy so half in love with her a thousand miles distant. I want to ask what it feels like not to be here.

  18

  Celia asks that I stay in her room, a hotel above the town. She’d found me walking in my shorts blinking at the sun. My goggles still on my head, my mind laid out somewhere between Marseille and Nice. She took me to a room in the Hotel de Rue. Now she has me lie on the bed. I lie and study what I can of the surrounds and the roof, of all her conversation.

  The day was a brute. I rode us up the mountains in unshaded heat and we fell back further. There was an argument at lunchtime, we stood about waiting for the issue to resolve itself as others got back on their machines. Eventually we were involved in a crash. The five of us along with 20 others. Clothes fell off and blood and skin decorated the dirt. I ignored the team in the hours after. If Opperman and Bruce wish to talk of our incompetence they are welcome. Celia found me walking and touched my wounds then took me up the stairs on which I sat under a fan for a time, the marble cool. The sun was almost gone by the time we lay on her bed.

  The room is full of brimming luggage, things dragged up from her car by porters in caps and buttoned-to-the-neck blue jackets. Matching Goyard pieces: more heraldic craft than mere suitcases. They seem to distract her. She moves past them as if they’re owned by someone else and left on the floor long ago uncollected. They’re foreign but familiar, heavy and never left on their own; if she leaves the room it’s for the road. She takes her meals in here, each drink ordered via the horn of the telephone, each item of food and beverage delivered on a cart. Her calm voice thanking them.

  Her bags are open and have many compartments into which she dives with thin arms.
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  It is difficult to know what she wants with me. But having found my prone body vomiting in the roses outside Hendaye, skin black from dust and sun and tar, I seem a part of her schedule. She follows in her Citroën, yellow like the flowers and the sun they are named for. I went to her when the day was done and she took me into her room in Perpignan and now again in Nice. But my purpose, I can’t say. It would be obvious if we removed our clothes, but we don’t. I have the feeling she is alone, or forced to be alone by others. As we speak I get the sense her youth was once laced with unfortunate things, that she knew the contents of adulthood before it came. Watching her I imagine alliances drawn up between her anxieties battling for superiority against black days. A guess.

  I lie down and she cradles me.

  She lights the pipe and soon I am dreaming with her. Leaning across the bed closing my eyes and hearing the world outside like a shower of present rain drifting up from the street. Street sounds, carts and shouts. Voices like the chimes of ricocheted water, sounds fascinating and small. Up and down the alley come the movement of voices, each quite distinct, each with a point. Voices enlarge like fish passing in the aquarium, shrinking as they turn, expanding near the glass. Peaceful wise statements.

  Celia wears blue, the tidal wash of her eyes.

  Sometimes silence, as from a well dug deep in the rock before the forest.

  She’s whispering above the almost-hum of the town – ‘Each year, each July I come here. I follow you from Paris. I watch. I watch you all come by, the peloton, the leaders, the stragglers. The sweaty grime of you all. I nip down back roads to catch you once you’ve passed and spy changes to the field. I watch for the weak ones to fall off the back and then I drive on and get myself ahead. I watch from hedgerows. I wear headscarves.’ She stops and I imagine she points back in the direction of Luchon and the Pyrénées. ‘I hide so none of you recognise me. I don’t like to be seen, acknowledged.’ I touch her face, it seems guarded by a sheet of gauze such is my vision under the whim of the opium. We touch the same air, we speak in the same voice, our bodies make contact but despite this togetherness I cannot claim to be feeling the same range of thoughts as her. I listen as if a foreigner inside the body of the world. ‘I’m the one who wills you on,’ she says. ‘I’m the one who asks that every one of you wins.’